Radiance (Wraith Kings Book 1)(67)
It was impossible to speak around the knot of tears lodged in her throat. Ildiko swallowed several times before answering. “No. He was in the thick of the fighting when I last saw him, and that was only a glimpse.” For all she knew, the Kai would arrive, with one bearing the news that he or she carried Brishen’s mortem light within them. The grim thought made it hard to breathe.
“Don’t lose heart, Ildiko.” Serovek abandoned his formality in an effort to comfort her. “They won’t kill him. Not yet at least.”
His words did nothing to lessen her fear for Brishen.
The ruins Serovek led them to butted up against a gentle slope surrounded by trees. Ildiko had no sorcery of her own, but even she sensed the presence of power here. The Beladine mounts balked at moving closer. Accustomed to the thrum and whisper of magic that every Kai possessed, no matter how weak, Anhuset’s gelding picked his way among the stones, unconcerned. The other horses soon followed.
Serovek motioned to the other riders, complicated hand signals that mystified Ildiko but that his soldiers understood. Three dismounted and melted into the shadows that ringed the temple’s perimeter. The remaining three gathered up the horses and led them deeper into the ruin’s sanctuary to shelter behind the ridges of broken half walls and copses of pillars. In the far distance a familiar howl rode the moonlight. Ildiko shuddered. Not again.
She followed Serovek who carried his unconscious burden through the low doorway of a tiny chapel within the temple ruin. The blackness inside hung thick enough to pour from a bottle, and the skitter and squeak of disturbed rats played on her ears. She leapt aside at the suspicious slither of something gliding along the floor near her foot.
“No light yet, Ildiko.” Serovek’s deep voice was more vibration than sound. “We wait.”
They stood in the suffocating silence, listening as the rustle of leaves stirred up by running feet crackled nearby. Long sniffs and quiet growls joined them.
Ildiko clenched her teeth together and tried not to breathe. Her heartbeat drummed so loud in her head, she was certain their pursuers could hear her.
“Anything?” a voice called out in the Common tongue.
Another answered. “Fresh tracks, but it’s a big party and the hooves are shod with shoes of Beladine making, not Kai.”
“Patrol then. We’re within Beladine territory, but it’s High Salure. That bastard Pangion would as soon hang us with our own innards as wink at us. His troops won’t be too friendly if they come across us. Let’s go.”
“Don’t you want to search the temple?”
Ildiko felt Serovek tense even more beside her, and his soft breaths stopped altogether.
“Why bother? Look at the magefinders. They’re just whining and sniffing about. Probably smelling badger or deer scat. The girl is riding with a Kai. If they were here, we’d know it by now. We’ll keep going. I’m not too keen to cross a patrol anyway.”
“I’m not keen on crossing that Kai. You saw what she did in the clearing. Took down all three hounds.”
“Just means you need to be on your guard. Let’s go.”
The minutes of silence stretched into an eternity of stillness until a night bird’s call sounded outside.
“They’re gone.” Serovek spoke in conversational volume. Shuffling noises accompanied his statement. “Outside, Highness, where we can see our hands in front of our faces.”
The moonlight seemed like the noonday sun after her time in the chapel’s sepulchral darkness. Ildiko blinked and caught sight of Serovek as he crouched to settle Anhuset gently on the ground. The Kai woman lay ominously still, but her chest rose and fell in easy rhythm, and Ildiko exhaled a relieved sigh.
Serovek rose. “Stay with her,” he said. “I need to get supplies from my horse.” He paused to give instructions to the two soldiers who stood guard nearby before disappearing into the foliage surrounding the temple grounds.
When he returned, he carried a small satchel, a blanket and a bottle. He dropped down next to Ildiko who was stroking Anhuset’s hair from her face. He fished inside the satchel and retrieved an oddly shaped utensil. Diamond-shaped with a shallow lip folded inward on all sides, it vaguely resembled a spoon, though Ildiko couldn’t figure out how such a design might adequately hold porridge and would never contain broth.
“What is that?” she asked.
Serovek took the knife belted at his side and cut away the laces on Anhuset’s hauberk. “An arrow spoon. If our luck holds, I won’t have to use it.” He didn’t expound further and split the stitching around the armored scales that were sewn to the gambeson and surrounded the shortened arrow shaft sticking out of Anhuset’s shoulder.
He cut through the quilted gambeson next and the clothing underneath. He set the knife aside. “I’m going to lift her up. I need you to peel away the hauberk and clothes. Quick but gentle. Can you do it?”
She nodded, and the two set to work. Anhuset rested still in Serovek’s embrace while Ildiko eased the hauberk, gambeson and shirt off her shoulders and away from the arrow shaft. Serovek laid the Kai woman onto her right side and bent for a closer look at the shoulder wound. “I think it’s a bodkin tip. I won’t know until I cut into her.” Ildiko blanched, and Serovek’s responding smile lacked all humor. “It’s a mercy she’s suffering through marseret poisoning. I’ll have to work fast before it wears off.”